Water Conditions README

Get real-time water temperature and tide prediction data for any lake, river, ocean, bay, or beach by name or latitude/longitude coordinates. Data sourced live from NOAA CO-OPS, USGS, and seatemperature.info, with automatic nearest-station matching for coordinate inputs. Coverage includes 8,000+ named locations across North America and major international bodies, with string to coordinate geocoding for fallback.

mcp-name: io.github.aybeeare/water-conditions

Roadmap: national sensor network expansion

Today's accuracy hierarchy is USGS/NOAA (real government sensors, ground-truth for the exact station) > seatemperature.info (best-guess aggregator, no known dedicated sensor network, used for everywhere else via geocoding). The plan is to extend the first tier — real sensor networks, wired in the same way as USGS/NOAA — country by country, rather than leaning on the aggregator fallback long-term. Goal: a genuine "super API" blending national sensor networks the way this project already blends USGS + NOAA.

Confirmed and ready to integrate (free, open, no API key required):

• UK Environment Agency — best next candidate. Hydrology API (river flows/levels/groundwater, ~8,000 stations, 15-min resolution) + Flood Monitoring API (river/tide levels) — same openness and simplicity as USGS/NOAA, Open Government Licence.
• France SHOM/REFMAR — ~100 real-time tide gauges, Licence Etalab 2.0.

Investigated, more complex integration:

• Copernicus Marine Service (EU/global sea surface temperature, satellite + in-situ) — free and authoritative, but the bulk data products are scientific-grade (NetCDF via a Python toolbox) rather than simple per-station JSON. Has a REST "In Situ Dashboard" worth a closer look.

Investigated, unclear near-term path:

• East Asia (Japan JMA/JODC, Korea KMA) — both have relevant agencies, but access looked more fragmented/licensed than the UK case in an initial search (Japan's tide data appears to route through an authorized distributor, not a clean open endpoint). Needs real investigation before committing — not a near-term target.

North America (USGS/NOAA) + Europe (UK EA, France SHOM) covers the current priority footprint well. Everything else stays on the geocoding + seatemperature.info fallback until/unless a specific region's sensor network turns out to be worth the integration effort.

Checking MCP activity (owner only)

Every call to the get_water_conditions tool is logged in the database. To pull a summary from the live server:

1. One-time setup — set ACTIVITY_API_KEY in Railway (already done). Note the value somewhere safe.

2. Run the activity script — open a terminal in this project folder and run these two commands:

$env:ACTIVITY_API_KEY="your-secret-here"
python scripts/activity.py

This prints total calls, unique locations queried, success rate, and the last 50 individual calls with timestamps and temperatures.

The $env: line only needs to be run once per terminal session. After that you can re-run python scripts/activity.py as many times as you like.